For today’s episode producer Bella Bravo spoke with poet Juliana Spahr about her book, Du Bois's Telegram: Literary Resistance and State Containment. This close study of how state interests have shaped contemporary U.S. literature was published by Harvard University Press in 2018.

In Du Bois’s Telegram, Spahr investigates the relationship between politics and art. Her research focuses on the institutional forces at work during three moments in US literature that sought to defy political orthodoxies through challenging linguistic conventions: first, the avant-garde modernism of the early twentieth century; second, the resistance-movement writing of the 1960s and 1970s; and, finally, in the twenty-first century, the abundance of English-language works integrating languages other than English.

Though her research reveals how easily aesthetic resistance is captured, Spahr does not decide to wholly reject the revolutionary potential of literature. In the end, Du Bois’s Telegram leads her to ask three questions: Can literature escape the nation? Has art effectively supported social movements in the past? What is the revolutionary capacity of literature?

Printed in Presence Africaine in September 1956

“I am not present at your meeting today because the United States government will not grant me a passport for travel abroad. Any Negro-American who travels abroad today must either not discuss race conditions in the United States or say the sort of thing which our state Department wishes the world to believe. The government especially objects to me because I am a Socialist and because I belief [sic] in peace with Communist states like the Soviet Union and their right to exist in security.

“Especially do I believe in socialism for Africa. The basic social history of the peoples of Africa is socialistic….It will be a fatal mistake if new Africa becomes the tool and cat's paw of the colonial powers and allows the vast power of the United States to mislead it into investment and exploitation of labor. I trust the black writers of the world will understand this and and will set themselves to lead Africa toward the light and nor backward toward a new colonialism where hand in hand with Britain, France and the United States, black capital enslaves black labor again….” W. E. B. Du Bois New York 30 August 1956

Juliana Spahr. Photo by Marissa Bell Toffoli (2010).

GUEST

Juliana Spahr is Professor of English at Mills College, and the author of eight volumes of poetry, including That Winter the Wolf Came, Well Then There Now, and Response, winner of the National Poetry Series Award. Spahr lives in the Bay Area, and following the Occupy Movement, the police shootings of Oscar Grant, Eric Garner, and Mike Brown, and the 2009 California college tuition hike protests, she co-founded the communist poetry imprint Commune Editions.

MUSIC

With one exception our music today comes from Dizzy Gillespie. We’ll highlight Gillespie’s Band on tour for the State Department in 1956 and 1957. The band performed in South America, the Middle East, and Greece and Gillespie became known as the "Ambassador of Jazz." We’re featuring three songs arranged by trombonist and band member Melba Liston.

“Annie’s Dance”

“Stella by Starlight”

“My Reverie”

"Yesterdays" (plays under the reading of Du Bois's August 1956 telegram)

"Night in Tunisia" (plays under Spahr reading from "Transitory, Momentary")

“I’m Confessin’”

INTERLUDE

"Kenyatta Listening to Mozart" by LeRoi Jones (published in 1963) mixed into Ornette Coleman's "Embraceable You" off of This is Our Music.

RELATED

Juliana Spahr at PennSound

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm